Arthur Ashe

by Raymond Arsenault

The vagaries of the so-called tennis wars would eventually determine the fate of the semipro, registered player option. But at the second stop on the Asian tour Ashe and his teammates found themselves in the midst of a real war. For nearly a week in mid-January 1969—the same week Richard Nixon entered the White House—the Davis Cup champions crisscrossed South Vietnam visiting hospitals and entertaining American troops with tennis exhibitions. It had been a year since the jolting disruption of the Tet Offensive, and the new normal among the American forces was frustration and confusion, a reality diplomatic and military officials did their best to hide.

  Throughout the tour of Vietnam, Ashe felt a bit strange as an Army lieutenant out of uniform, and his fervent opposition to the war did not help matters. With a younger brother who had served two year-long deployments on the front line of the conflict, he viewed the war in highly personal terms, and nothing he saw or heard in Vietnam provided any reassurance that the sacrifices his brother and others had made were justified. As he listened to a series of glowing assessments of the American war effort, he sensed his official hosts were offering little more than self-serving propaganda.

  In Saigon, the team spent a memorable—and for Arthur a thoroughly disillusioning—lunch listening to American ambassador Ellsworth Bunker hold forth on the march to victory. “His manner at his home . . . was more like that of a businessman who had just shot 80 on the golf course,” Arthur recalled years later, adding that his most vivid memory of the visit to the embassy residence was that Bunker “lived just across the back alley from ‘the best little whorehouse in Saigon.’ ”

  The mood was more somber when the team received a briefing from General Creighton Abrams at the “Pentagon East” headquarters of the Military Assistance Command. The overall commander of American forces in Vietnam, Abrams proudly described the current strategy of “sweeps” and “search and destroy” missions. When Arthur questioned the advisability of the search and destroy technique, which often led to massive civilian casualties, Abrams grew defensive. “Well, we’re trying to contain communism here,” the general growled. “If we don’t, you’ll wind up fighting them on our shores. Take your pick.”

  After an awkward pause, the briefing turned to the subject of declining morale among American soldiers. “Morale is my biggest problem, even among the officers,” Abrams conceded. Yet when Arthur asked him about the special problems facing black soldiers, the general sidestepped the issue of racism by launching into a discussion of drug abuse. Not all of the serious drug users were black, he acknowledged, but the implication of racial pathology was clear. After Arthur blurted out, “Soon, I’ll have a brother over here,” Abrams offered the consolation that “hopefully, we’ll finish by then.” Unconvinced, the young lieutenant left the briefing with a heightened skepticism about the rationale and leadership of the American war effort.22

  The next stop, the military hospital at Long Binh, was even more eye-opening. Here, during a series of exhibition matches played on the hospital grounds, Ashe had his first brush with actual combat. Midway through a doubles match pitting Ashe and Pasarell against Smith and Lutz, several mortar shells landed somewhere near the base, not in close proximity to the hospital but close enough for the players to see puffs of smoke. “We became quite nervous,” Ashe recalled, “and at one point Lutz dropped his racquet and started to run off the court. The soldiers in the bleachers were amused and watched the mortar rounds without moving. We were embarrassed, but we had not gone through the initiation to real war.”

  Later that day, as they visited the Long Binh hospital wards, the tennis delegation came face-to-face with the consequences of the real war. “We were stunned by what we saw,” Arthur reported. “For the first time, the full impact of the war was brought home. We saw GIs who had lost their eyes, part of a face, arms or legs. We saw jaws wired shut or eyes closed and greased to keep the lids from being shut. It was difficult to absorb, especially so for Lutz. Bob had been happy-go-lucky, but the experience in Vietnam had a visible effect on him.”23

  Arthur was shaken by what he saw in Vietnam, and by the time he left the war-torn nation in late January he had concerns about the dangers his brother, who had already experienced two years of combat, would face during a third deployment. This sense of foreboding lingered, but he did his best to fulfill the assigned goodwill mission as the Davis Cuppers made their way across Burma, Laos, Cambodia, Indonesia, Thailand, Hong Kong, the Philippines, and Japan. As tennis “ambassadors,” he and his teammates did their best to be upbeat and friendly, cheerfully representing American openness and optimism in a part of the world that had ample reasons to be wary of American power.

  This was not always an easy task. Navigating the customs of so many countries in such a short span of time was a serious challenge for young men who had some familiarity with Europe, Latin America, and Australia but no previous experiences in Asia. Yet somehow they managed. For Arthur, the most intellectually inquisitive of the bunch, the final week and a half of the trip was an educational treasure, especially when it came to matters of race. “You might wonder about my fascination with the issue of color,” he later acknowledged. “It is something related to my past and something I saw wherever I went. I had to catalogue the phenomenon and make sense of it for my own value system.”

  His particular interest in Asian cultures dated back to his UCLA days, when he had first explored comparative cultural and racial mores while taking an anthropology course. Now he had the opportunity to observe firsthand the complex racial hierarchies of Asian life. “My tour of Southeast Asia and Japan confirmed the universal nature of the color problem,” he explained. “The racism of Asia was a fascinating counterpoint to that of America and the British Commonwealth. . . . The Japanese and the Chinese sat at the top of the pecking order, with the Burmese, Laotians, Cambodians, and Vietnamese at the bottom and the Koreans and Thais somewhere in the middle.” Indeed, after observing that the rickshaw drivers and airport baggage handlers in Hong Kong “were not likely to be Chinese at all,” he came to the sad conclusion “that the entire world was stratified by color.”24

  Ashe had plenty of time to think about his impressions of Asia during the long flight back to the States. After a brief stopover in Hawaii, the team flew to California and then on to Washington for a celebratory luncheon at the White House arranged by Robert Kelleher, the president of the USLTA. When the plane arrived at National Airport at eight in the morning, Kelleher was there to greet the Davis Cuppers, who, to his disappointment, had returned home wearing blue jeans and sporting scraggly beards and unkempt hair. After Kelleher, with Dell’s help, marched them to the barbershop and monitored their choice of luncheon outfits, the team arrived at the White House looking fairly respectable. Even so, President Nixon, who was reputed to loathe the game of tennis, turned out to be a stiff host. After an hour of awkward chatter, the president presented each player with a set of gold cuff links and a box of golf balls stamped with the official White House seal. Puzzled, the Davis Cuppers soon departed, thankful for the presidential invitation but wondering if he actually knew what game they played.25

  From Washington, Ashe traveled to Richmond, arriving just in time to play in the Fidelity Bankers Invitational in front of a hometown crowd. Exhausted and jet-lagged, he lost a semifinal match in straight sets to Tom Koch. Later in the day, he and Pasarell suffered a second embarrassment in the doubles when they lost to a team that included a fresh-faced, eighteen-year-old Junior from New York. The tendinitis in Ashe’s elbow had returned, and it was even worse the following week at the Philadelphia Open (the world’s first indoor Open tournament), where he lost in the first round to the young Czech Jan Kodes. “It only hurts when I serve,” Ashe told the press, but he admitted he was considering withdrawing from the upcoming National Indoor Championship tournament scheduled for mid-February.26

  This was not the way he had envisioned his post–Davis Cup homecoming, but he had bigger concerns than nursing a sore elbow. The leadership of the USLTA
was meeting in Belleair, Florida, in an effort to forestall a threatened pro boycott of Open Tennis. Also at issue was the future of the registered player category that would allow Ashe and others to turn professional without losing their Davis Cup eligibility. If the USLTA voted the right way, he would retain the option of becoming an “independent” pro able to accept prize money without signing a contract with either WCT or the NTL. Whatever ruling the USLTA came up with could be rendered meaningless by the ILTF board, which was scheduled to meet in July to consider granting “self-determination to each nation with regard to open tournaments.” But voting to change the current USLTA policy, which allowed noncontract pros to play in Open tournaments but not in invitational pro tournaments, was an important step in the process.

  The USLTA’s unanimous ruling on February 8 sanctioned the continuation of the registered player category, but conflicting statements regarding the new rules made the situation more confusing than ever. “Can American tournaments, other than the five sanctioned opens, offer prize money to the new category of player,” New York Times tennis writer Neil Amdur asked; “or must these tournaments again face the task of dealing with the delicate matter of appearance money or expense money?” Unfortunately, the various answers to this question issued by the individual members of the USLTA governing committee provided no clear guidance for tournament officials or for players like Ashe facing difficult career decisions.27

  The only certainty for Ashe was that he was about to leave active duty in the Army. His honorable discharge on February 24 made it official: even though he would remain in the inactive Army reserves for another decade, Lieutenant Arthur Ashe was essentially a civilian again. Aside from the March 1968 reprimand for speaking out at the Reverend Rogers’s forum, the Army had been good to him, giving him the time and freedom to play Davis Cup and to raise his game to a new level. Along the way he had developed several close friendships at West Point. Despite his strong feelings about the war, he reentered civilian life with a deep respect for the traditional military values of discipline and honor. In this respect, he was still his father’s son.

  Even so, he felt a great sense of liberation. “I’m as excited as hell,” he told a group of reporters on his first day as a civilian. “Some of the strains have been cut. I’m a tennis player with one hat on, and I can be a businessman with another hat on. I’ve got the whole world at my feet and I can pick and choose.” When asked to provide specifics, he mentioned business opportunities with the Philip Morris Company and the Hobson-Miller Paper Company, as well as plans to buy a coin laundromat. Reiterating his reluctance to become a contract pro, he once again stated his preference to play as an independent—to be, in effect, his “own boss.” Calling himself a “maverick,” he stressed the importance of freeing up time to continue his civil rights–related work with the Urban League. “Talking and working with kids is important to me,” he explained. “I just think that for me my freedom to do what I want and play where I want is more important than money.” Two days later, George MacCall of the NTL confirmed that earlier in the year Ashe had spurned his offer of a $400,000 five-year contract.28

  In late March, during a tournament in St. Petersburg, Florida, Ashe elaborated on his decision to turn MacCall down. It wasn’t that he didn’t want to make money from tennis; on the contrary, like all tennis professionals he looked to the game for his livelihood. “I am a pro,” he declared. “I’m out to earn all the prize money I can, not as a contract pro but as an independent businessman.” What set him apart was his determination to maintain both his independence and a balance between financial success and the pursuit of excellence in other areas of life.

  His motivations, he freely acknowledged, were complex and by no means entirely altruistic: “I just got out of the Army and I relish my freedom. For the first time in two years I can go where I want and do what I want. If I were under contract, I would have to go where I was told to go. This way I can play one week, lay off the next and even make a trip to the moon if anyone invites me. . . . Most of all, I want to win at Wimbledon. I’d play there even if there were no prizes because the prestige of winning is beyond calculation. That’s what also is so attractive about not becoming a formal pro but remaining eligible for Davis Cup. Again prestige is involved. How else could I have luncheon at the White House with the President?”

  In an age when big money was asserting its dominance over the sporting world, Ashe’s comments on the limits of pecuniary motivation were unusual to say the least. But even more unusual was his forthright commitment to social action on behalf of the black community. “Another reason for retaining my independence as a player is that I have commitments in an area that means so much to me, the black area,” he explained. “I’m working with Whitney Young in the Urban League. . . . I guess we’d be classified as moderates, but we get the job done. One of our aims is to get jobs for dropouts, and we are meeting with success. I can do something no social worker, no matter how well intentioned, can do. I can walk into any poolroom in Harlem, and those kids listen to me. I talk their language and they know who I am and what I’ve done. I’m also buying a Laundromat in a Jersey ghetto area, and I am investing in a Negro insurance company.”29

  Ashe’s brash claim to what would later be termed “street cred” was dubious at best, but his assertion of racial solidarity was revealing. Public identification with the civil rights struggle clearly had become important to him and would become even more so in the years to come. When his Davis Cup teammates teasingly called him “our little militant,” he laughed. Yet his personal interest in the plight of the black community was serious business. After years of relative passivity, he was now fully engaged in the struggle, though he continued to avoid racial conflict whenever possible.

  Before Arthur left St. Petersburg, for example, he was involved in an ugly incident at the private, all-white Lakewood Country Club. When all of the courts at the tournament venue—a public facility located in a predominantly black neighborhood—were full and could not accommodate his practice session, he moved the session to Lakewood at the suggestion of Paul Reilly, a fifteen-year-old white ball boy who insisted the pro at the private facility wouldn’t mind. But as soon as Arthur and Paul began to volley, a golf cart from the nearby Lakewood course raced toward their court with the driver screaming, “Get the nigger off the court!” Embarrassed, Paul stepped forward, ready to confront the racist intruder. But Arthur immediately intervened to defuse the situation. “Let’s just go,” he advised, putting himself between the boy and the golfer. “I don’t want you to get in trouble because of me.” So they left, leaving the desegregation of the country club for another day. This was certainly not the way Arthur had envisioned the closing moments of his amateur career, but in characteristic fashion his concern for others took precedence over his own urge to vent or strike back. In the struggle for the long haul, he could not allow one ignorant man to get under his skin or cause him to lose his cool.

  “His militancy is the quiet kind, without flamboyance,” Arthur Daley observed later that week, but it was “extremely effective” nonetheless. Impressed by Ashe’s levelheaded, practical approach to life, he predicted the young tennis star would ultimately have the best of both worlds—the satisfaction of helping his race and the benefits of financial security. “He’ll make it all right,” Daley insisted, “because he’s a smart and resourceful independent businessman, who is currently disguised as a player.” During fifteen years of amateur competition, Ashe had received college scholarships, travel and expense money, innumerable trophies and plaques, and even a few gifts. Yet not a penny of prize money had come his way. That situation was about to change.30

  On March 25, 1969, Ashe traveled to New York to begin his new life as a noncontract professional tennis player. The inaugural Madison Square Garden Open was offering $25,000 in total prize money, with $5,290 going to the tournament champion. But to walk away with serious money, Ashe would have to overcome a top-notch field featuring many of the world
’s best players, including the great Australians—Laver, Roche, Emerson, and Newcombe—and the forty-year-old legend Pancho Gonzales. Playing on a new rubberized indoor surface called Uni-Turf and still nursing his aching right elbow, Ashe entered the tournament with low expectations. Yet somehow he managed to fight his way into the final, beating Scott, Moore, Pasarell, and Emerson.

  The other finalist was Andrés Gimeno, the thirty-one-year-old Spaniard who had served as Ashe’s doubles partner at the U.S. Open. The two men had never faced each other, but Ashe suspected he was in for a long day against a veteran pro known for his exhausting baseline game. In the early going it appeared that Ashe—who only managed to win three games in the first two sets and lost his serve seven consecutive times—would be dispatched in straight sets. But he rallied to win the third and fourth sets, setting the stage for a showdown in the fifth. Trailing 0–4 in the final set, Ashe surged back again, eventually drawing even as the match approached the three-hour mark. In the end, after Ashe fought off six match points, Gimeno prevailed 9–7. Even so, the rookie’s valiant effort delighted the New York crowd, earning him considerable respect and a $3,690 paycheck.31

  Two days later, Ashe was in San Juan for the Caribe Hilton International, an amateur tournament that temporarily put him back in the position of accepting expense money. Once again he made it to the final match, and this time he won, outlasting Charlie Pasarell in five sets. It had been six months since his last tournament victory, and he hoped this breakthrough was a sign he had put the sore elbow and the slump behind him.32

  Ashe’s first challenge after San Juan, however, was getting to New York in time for an important luncheon at the 21 Club. For several weeks, he had been consulting with Sidney B. Wood Jr., the 1931 Wimbledon singles champion and president of the Town Tennis Club, a posh indoor tennis facility on East 56th Street. Wood was also the head of the Tennis Development Corporation, the manufacturer of a synthetic surface called Supreme Court. At the luncheon, he introduced Ashe as the new director of the Town Tennis Club and as the product evaluator of Supreme Court, purportedly a durable and relatively inexpensive option to traditional grass courts.